Page 35 of You Weren’t Meant to Be Human

Twenty-Five

Crane leans in the dirty hallway, wearing Stagger’s jacket and supporting his heavy belly with one hand, while Levi drags in a pile of curtains, poles, a torn-up box sporting a faded picture of a crib, and a few other things that all melt together in Crane’s head as baby stuff .

This is, for all intents and purposes, none of his business. But while Crane knows absolutely fuck-all about raising babies, this doesn’t exactly seem like a lot.

Levi must notice the unimpressed vibe, because he snorts and dumps everything on the ground. Stagger, from his place half-awake on the couch, keeps an eye on the situation like a hawk watching a rabbit.

“Your ma was gonna give us a changing table,” Levi says, “but it was a cheap piece of shit. Dry-rotted.” He pulls out a quilt with the Goodwill tag still on it. “The floor’ll work fine.”

The folding table gets shoved to the side and Levi sets to work with the measuring tape and a step stool, grease pencil in his mouth, marking out tracks on the ceiling to cordon off a nursery with curtains. Screws lay scattered on the floor.

Crane wants something to do. He drags the busted crib-box to the designated corner and rips it open because it’s already in bad-enough shape.

“Screwdriver’s in the toolbox,” Levi mutters around the grease pencil, fumbling with the tape measure. This is more than Levi has spoken to Crane in weeks. “Allen wrenches too, if you need ’em.”

The instruction manual is two pages of actual instructions and three pages of YOUR BABY WILL DIE IF YOU LOOK AT IT FUNNY, which doesn’t feel like a great ratio.

According to the manufacturer, anything will kill a baby.

Pillows, draw cords, plastic bags, the crib itself if you’re not careful.

Crane is both unsure of how the human species has managed to exist when their offspring spend every waking second attempting to destroy themselves, and also relates to this deeply.

It’s nice to actually build something, though.

Even if it’s slow going, two fingers on the left hand out of commission and all.

He lays out the pieces and the hardware and hopes he doesn’t have to fetch anything else, because sitting on the floor at thirty-four weeks without a plan on how to get back up is a bad decision he keeps making.

Levi takes the grease pencil out of his mouth, makes another mark on the ceiling, lets the tape measure slide closed with a slap.

“So,” he says. “You get what you wanted out of that?”

Crane looks up. Levi points the pencil in the general vicinity of Crane’s face.

“That. Is that what all this shit’s been about?”

Crane nods as he works a screw into one of the legs of the crib. All the blisters have popped, but the skin is still raw; his lips and eyelids have lost definition. He’s discolored and visibly changed.

It’s not as much as he used to want—certainly not as bad as Sophie always wanted it to be. But it’s enough to last.

“Huh.” Levi glares at his work on the ceiling for a moment before deciding it’s close enough, then drags the step stool over to plan out the other half. “Should’ve told me. I would’ve done it for you a while ago, if you wanted. Feel like it would’ve saved us some trouble.”

Across the apartment, Stagger growls, and Levi shoots back with, “It was a fucking joke,” but Crane is thinking about it.

Last year, if Levi had offered to disfigure him, it would have been the kindest thing ever done for him.

It would have been a declaration of love.

Nobody had ever loved him so much they would do something terrible on his behalf.

As Crane mulls over the instructions, trying to figure out how the wooden feet fit onto the crib’s leg, he pictures it.

Levi laying him down, arms pinned under knees, and a hand in his hair to hold him still, knife poised to open his mouth in massive gashes to his ears.

Consensual vitriolage behind the gas station.

Levi easing matches from Crane’s hand and cradling him, whispering against his temple, “C’mere, baby. Let me do it.”

He would’ve been smitten. He would’ve been so fucking wet.

These days, though, he feels the dirt every time Levi gets too close. Even when it’s almost impossible to brush his teeth, he tries scraping the plaque away with a tissue, or the hem of his shirt if he can’t manage standing to fetch one. It never works. It’s still there.

At least Levi hasn’t touched him since the morning at the auction house. Hasn’t tried to put his cock inside him, or fingers.

Sometimes, instead, Crane thinks about fucking Stagger. Signing please , signing can I , stripping those ripstop pants off his thighs and swallowing whatever he finds down there.

With one leg of the crib done, Crane moves onto the next. Levi extends the tape measure, makes another few marks, then gets off the step stool and backs away to eyeball the whole thing. The baby shifts and Crane hums. Give me a break, I’m busy.

“You think it matters if there’s a gap?” Levi says. He crosses his arms, gives the measurements another hard stare as if that’ll make them shape up. “I figure it’s a baby, it won’t give a shit.”

From what Crane’s read, it will absolutely give a shit. It’s going to be one hundred percent Levi’s problem, though. Crane lets out a loud snort, and Levi sighs.

“I’ll figure it out,” he says. “Or Tammy will.”

That’s true. Tammy’s going to be doing a lot of work around here. There’s no way in hell Levi is going to touch a diaper.

Eventually, two sides of the crib come together—it’s bigger than Crane thought it would be, there’s no way that babies are this big, right?

—and Levi screws supports for the curtain rods into the ceiling, which would’ve forfeited their security deposit if there wasn’t already blood irreversibly smeared into the bathtub.

(Again, who the absolute fuck paints a bathtub .) Besides that, there’s not much else that got brought home; a quilt that’ll go on the floor to act as a changing table, a set of sheets for the crib mattress.

One of the bags, which Levi says he got off Facebook Marketplace, was from a mom cleaning out her closet.

Most of it seems promising, even if some of the onesies are stained.

Levi is convinced the idea of a baby monitor is stupid.

Crane pauses to inspect a onesie. The crabs printed on it look exactly like Luna’s squishy crab toy. It’s newborn-size. It seems small until he remembers he’s going to have to push this thing out.

It was easier to hate the baby when he thought it was a maggot.

He’s still managing it.

It’s half Levi. No matter what he does, or how much he manages to distract himself, Levi is always inside him. Always feeding off him. Maybe that’s the grit on the back of his teeth. Maybe that’s the dirt.

He hopes that the son of a bitch, currently taking off his shirt because there’s no way to adjust the heat in the apartment—and god, is the HVAC stuck on high ?

—is starting to clock the consequences of his actions, but Crane cannot name a single cis man who’s ever had to deal with the consequences of having a baby, so.

Though. There’s that scar again. Not the one on the shoulder that Crane had stitched up months ago, but the other one, the one he’d almost forgotten about: the raised keloid right on the side of the gut.

The curtains go up. They’re gray, and probably could do better at blocking out light, but they’re fine.

When Levi closes them, it turns this corner of the apartment into a dim cave, quiet and muffled.

Stagger doesn’t like not being able to see them, or maybe he’s intrigued by the new setup.

He comes over and fiddles with the fabric.

“It’ll work,” Levi decides.

The crib is almost done, and Levi sits down beside Crane, picks up some of the extra tools, nudges his way in to finish it up. Their legs touch. Crane doesn’t like it, but he doesn’t move because he’s being good.

Of course, the baby thinks it’s a great time to try to roll over.

What’s probably a head jams right into the spine and what might be a knee or foot paws at the walls of its fleshy prison cell, wriggling until it finds a good spot and, Jesus, where’s that photo of an eel ripping out of a heron’s stomach, that is exactly what it feels like.

Crane glares at his belly and hisses, an odd catlike tshhh sound. Fucking settle.

Levi snorts. “Is it messing with you?”

No shit.

“If it’s anything like you, it’s going to be one stubborn motherfucker.” He screws on one of the crib walls and shakes it to make sure it’s sturdy, which jingles his dog tags. “Frustrating, too.”

Crane leans back on his hands. Not if Levi breaks it first.

Levi’s gaze narrows in on the belly.

If he’s noticed that Crane is wearing Stagger’s jacket, he hasn’t given any indication, but it’s unbuttoned and drapes around the swollen stomach, showing an oversized Metallica tee from Levi’s time in Fort Knox.

Levi’s clothes are the only things he feels comfortable in anymore, with regard to size, even if the smell of him is sickening.

Levi looks at Crane’s belly the way Stagger looked at Hannah, or Jess—drawn to it, possibly unsure why.

Levi pushes under the shirt to feel it.

Crane does not wince. He lets it happen. Levi presses in just a little bit, tries to locate where exactly the baby might be, as if there’s a whole lot of space left for it to go anymore.

The baby responds with a nudge.

Levi recoils, visibly disgusted. “Fuck.”

Crane doesn’t react, but he wants to take the screwdriver and put it through his eyeball directly into the brain.

Levi does not get to do that. Levi doesn’t get to act like this is gross to him , like this is freaking him out or leaving a bad taste in his mouth.

Not after fucking Crane on the auction house floor while he cried, not after Jess bled over the bathroom floor after shoving a sharp object up her cunt to kill a fetus.

Is it finally clicking for him? Was he asked to do this by the hive and is only now arriving at the reality of the situation, now that it’s not just getting off?

Is that why he’s been sleeping on the couch—because he doesn’t want to get too close to what he’s done?

Fun part’s over, huh. Maybe he’s realizing that Crane won’t be able to take care of a baby with a disability that’s currently making it near impossible to bathe, that if anything goes wrong the hive will blame him , that it’s real and it’s happening and there’s only six weeks left.

And Levi doesn’t even know that Crane’s not gonna be there at all. Sorry. Hope he and Tammy can steal enough money to cover formula.

Crane should probably feel guilty that he’s leaving the baby with the man sitting across from him, but that would require a level of care that he is psychologically incapable of at the moment.

Levi finishes the crib. It’s made of pale oak and seems pretty decent considering that it was probably picked up off the side of the road. The mattress board gets moved up to the highest rung, the green sheets put on the mattress itself, and Levi gets up to push it into place.

That keloid scar is just inches from Crane’s nose.

The strange keloid scar. In such an odd place, healing worse than he’s seen anything heal on Levi before.

He reaches up to touch it.

Levi grabs his wrist. “Mm-mm. Nope.”

Stagger doesn’t even have to make a sound before Levi lets go. Just cuts a glance across the tiny nursery. Levi gets the hint.